It's officially the weekend. You heard it here first, folks. It also marks the beginning of my seven day work week, since tomorrow is my first day at the yuppie bakery. I hope you're happy now Mr. Student Loan that I am now slaving away in the East Bay seven days a week, five in the feet-hurting pharmacy warehouse, two more in the yuppie-infested bakery next to the train station. The only three things I hope to gain from my new weekend employment are cash, free baked goods, and stories about how lame the yuppies are, sort of like the customer stories featuered here. I swear, it's going to feel weird working with a bunch of high school kids on their summer jobs. Very, very strange.

Mondays following good weekends never seen to hurt as bad. The brother came up and we went out
to the 'burbs and had an enjoyable dinner with my dad. Then we headed back to the homestead
and had some beers in the quiet East Bay evening, sitting outside next to the heat lamps and
talking about geography, music, and literature. Really, what else do you need?

Yesterday we got up and walked up the the neighborhood center and fetched coffee and bagels, sat
out on a park bench and ate in the sun while we attempted to purge Mr. Sleepy from our collective
heads. We ended up at a field on the UC Berkeley campus before the annual Amoeba Records East Bay vs. West Bay softball game, playing
catch with my brand new baseball. About ten minutes into it, I threw the ball over his head and
on top of the storage shed sitting right behind him. I ran around to the other side to fetch my
ball and was confronted with a hill of thick green ivy. Cursing my luck, I searched through the
mess for a good fifteen minutes, finding a dirty baseball glove, a softball, a tennis ball, a golf
ball, but not my new baseball. At least I'm a working adult with a steady income and I can *buy*
a new baseball, and not a 12 year old who would have to find some cans to recycle, and then ride
his bike down to the recycling center to make four bucks.

I took off from the field and drove down to Santa Cruz, playing with new routes trying to avoid
traffic jams. I was pretty successful and made good time, picked up Miss Rodeo America and her
load of new vintage cookbooks, and headed back to Oakland in time to catch the fog rolling in
from the bay. Nothing to complain about there, it's the usual summertime phenomenon around the bay.

MP3 of the week:Spoon kick
serious ass. They caught my attention at Noisepop '97 while all wearing cowboy hats and covering
aMiniature's "Towner On The B-Side" to a confused crowd at Bimbo's 365 Club in SF. I quickly picked
up their then just-released debut album, the Elvis Costello mimicking Telephono from a used
record store the next day, and have been hooked ever since. Their second full-length, A Series Of Sneaks was
a major-label bomb for Elektra, but has just been re-released Merge records. I remember there being
so many copies of this record in the used section that they started a pile below all the other CDs and
marked them at $4.95 in hopes of ridding themselves of the clutter. Spoon got more popular, that pile disappeared,
and the CDs quickly became much sought
after items by fans. Sort of like Jawbreaker'sDear You fiasco back in 1994, where the record went from
bargain-bin bomb to a $60.00 put-the-CD-on-the-wall-behind-the-record-store-counter item in a few years time. I have friends who paid
for part of their college by selling copies of this record on Ebay in its early days. Finding one at, say, the Wherehouse was like finding
fifty or sixty dollars. Apparently Blackbacll records plan on re-releasing the album soon, putting a proper end to all the
speculating. A few years too late, but a welcomed release nonetheless.

I've dubbed today "Listen To Mixes Only Day," and will do just that as I watch the clock tick tick tick the time away.